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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

I've always been curious to find out if there is a study of California's location relative to it's GDP.

How much of the GDP is based on coastline, major ports, access to imports from China/Southeast Asia that get distributed to the rest of the US, US based companies located there with manufacturing based in China and even Mexico.

Geographically, it seems like it's in an ideal location to hold business HQ's with access to less expensive labor for imported goods.

Is there a study like this out there?

You compare that to the UK that doesn't have any clearly accessible inexpensive labor force option and it makes you wonder.

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California...and the West Coast of the U.S. is an interesting place in that it's geographically divided from the rest of the country by a couple of major mountain ranges and large deserts. In addition, something like almost 50% of the state is unusable federal land (national parks, military bases, etc.)

Despite this, it's one of the major agricultural producers in the world due to it's variety of climate zones and long growing seasons. I'm not sure of the current status, but agriculture used to be a larger industry for the state than tech and film combined.

One might think that its geographic location would be a problem, and cross-Pacific trade isn't as big as cross-Atlantic, but it's just so large and populated as a state, and it turns out that intra-Americas trade is far dominant to either oceanic competitor. Just selling its products and services to the U.S. alone brings it enormous economic activity. But it turns out that most of what it produces also has ample foreign markets as well (tech, film, food).

Federal land percentages by state map: http://assets3.bigthink.com/system/tinymce_assets/944/origin... Amazing how much of the West is federal land. http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/291-federal-lands-in-the-us

Federal land by state table (numbers vary between years and by counting method - Utah federal lands have increased significantly since 2004): https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state#Fede...

California map: https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/printable/images/pdf/fed...

I looked up the stats on public vs. private land in each state and was totally surprised to see that your 50% figure is correct (actually 52% on that chart I was looking at). That said, much of that land falls into national and state parks, monuments, recreational areas, forests, lakes and reservoirs, all of which make the state a more pleasant place to live and recreate in so I'm perfectly fine with that.

I feel much the same. A big chunk of Oregon is federally owned, and a non-trivial amount of that is the national forests directly east of Portland. The idea of that all being privately owned makes me shudder. I love being able to go out and enjoy the wilderness without having it chained off an inaccessible to people not rich enough to buy a chunk for themselves.

You should see Nevada - the federal government owns 85% of the land there.

It appears that agriculture accounts for about 2% of the "gross state product".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California#Agricult...

> cross-Pacific trade isn't as big as cross-Atlantic

Huh? Newport Beach is the busiest port in the world. Cross-Pacific trade dwarfs cross-Atlantic trade.

>Huh? Newport Beach is the busiest port in the world. Cross-Pacific trade dwarfs cross-Atlantic trade.

Huh? Newport Beach? If you mean the Port of Los Angeles, which is next to Long Beach, but is actually in San Pedro, you're not even close. It's not even the busiest in America.

Measured by tonnage: Busiest port in the world is Ningbo-Zhoushan, China. Busiest American port is South Louisiana (#14 worldwide).[0]

Measured by containers: Busiest port in the world is Shanghai, China. Busiest American port is Los Angeles (#17 worldwide).[1]

Measured by transshipments: Busiest port in the world is Singapore. Busiest American port is Los Angeles (#17 worldwide).[2]

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_ports_by_cargo...

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port...

[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_transshipment_...

Where'd you find that? I googled for busiest ports and found LA is the 17th and Long Beach the 21st busiest in the world. And they are totally dwarfed by Shanghai and Singapore.

You mean Long Beach, right?

Yes. It was a poorly made claim. I should have looked it up. I meant LA/Long Beach which are actually two ports, side by side.

I also overstated the domain. I should have confined the claim to the country, not the world. And as others have pointed out, even at a national level, the claim is disputable.

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